Blog Post #9

Wuhan, Monday, March 31, 2014

As you look out our hotel window, you see a courtyard of concrete surrounded by apartment buildings, most with balconies filled with clothes drying and iron grillwork, often rusty, and bicycles.  Above the roof a red cross lights up at night, and that is from the tower of Thanksgiving Church. Churches in China have red crosses, large neon ones, on top, and churches are large. This one has ten floors, I think, three floors for worship services, another couple for classrooms and offices, and the rest are used as apartments and dormitories for workers at the church and for seminary students.

We saw a dorm room and it was something students in the US wouldn’t be happy with. It was classroom size and had bunk beds all around the room. The student that showed it to us said up to 20 people lived there. In the center of the room were several tables for studying. That was it. No fridge, no microwave, no closets, no TV set. Many had hung a blanket down the side of their bunk bed for a bit of privacy. It had no bathroom, but I presume there was one down the hall. We haven’t seen the apartments where the pastors and church workers live, but I presume that they are modest as well.

Housing here in Wuhan is spare as a rule. Life under Mao and then the Cultural Revolution is not far enough in the past that the older generation has forgotten it, and told the younger generation. It seems people have very modest expectations for housing. Wuhan is hot in much of the year, and I think people spend much of their leisure time outside. We see tables of card players and domino players on the sidewalk, as well as people sitting chatting, smoking, eating or cooking. Kids play outdoors, almost always with a parent close by. Dogs are tied up outside. People peel their water chestnuts, and other vegetables outside. We see them washing dishes outside under a tap.

Jim had a new class today, second year theology students. They were a bit older, and more interested. It was a smaller class and very cordial. After class we ate with some of the teachers and with the President. He told us he had gone to Hong Kong for various meetings over the weekend and when his plane was to depart last night at 8 there were thunderstorms overhead so the plane was delayed. He said they sat on the plane until 3 a.m. when it finally took off, and he got back to Wuhan at 6:30 this morning. No sleep. I don’t think I could sit on a plane waiting to take off for that long!

We visited a famous tourist site just a quarter mile from where we are staying this afternoon, the Yellow Crane Tower. It is important for Chinese poets and artists and is situated in a lovely park with many pavilions and pagodas, a large Buddhist bell and a five-level wooden tower with five viewing platforms outside and lovely tile work, painting and dark wood carvings inside. There seemed to be many visitors from other parts of China. A young girl from Chengdu, in southwestern China, asked if she could have her photo taken with me. Her mom told us they had flown here for a holiday. This following weekend is “Sweeping the Graves” holiday, when people visit the graves of their ancestors and clean them up, plant flowers etc. She said her grandparents were from Wuhan, thus they had come here. It made me wonder if her parents were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, when so many educated people were displaced to rural areas of China. But who knows? Anyway, the view of the city and the park were beautiful, and the gardens were lovely.

We went to the closest noodle shop for supper. In came a pretty young woman who knows a tiny bit of English and whom we have met at the church where she is a receptionist, so she ate with us. She helped us with pronunciation of some of the Chinese words we are learning.

Now we are watching CCTV, the Chinese news station in English, about Malaysian flight 370. Still no new information. The Chinese are absolutely up in arms about this. A teacher at lunch today says he doesn’t think anything will ever be found, but he finds this impossible to believe, with all the satellite information in this world. So sad.

We only have four more days here. Hard to believe how quickly the time has gone. We are so thankful for this experience to get a bit of a taste of China, its people and culture.